ਲਾਲ ਸਿੰਘ ਦਿਲਲਾਲ ਸਿੰਘ ਦਿਲ

Lal Singh Dil (1943–2007) was a Punjabi poet from Ghungrali Sikhan, near Samrala in Ludhiana district. A Dalit, a Naxalite and later a tea-stall owner, he wrote Satluj di Hava, Bahut Saare Suraj and the memoir Dastaan, and is counted among the most important Punjabi poets of the 20th century.

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Dil was born on 11 April 1943 in Ghungrali Sikhan, near Samrala, into a landless Ramdasia Chamar family. His father, Raunqi Ram, worked as a daily-wage labourer for the village landowners, and his mother, Chint Kaur, kept him in school at Samrala. He passed Class 10 around 1960–61, the first in his clan to do so, and later tried a year at A.S. College in Khanna and a teachers' training course at Bahilolpur, but could not complete either.

Caste humiliation shaped him early. In his memoir he recalled being whipped as a small boy for bathing at a landowner's well. Another incident stayed with him for life: while he was tutoring a higher-caste girl, her mother picked up his tea tumbler with tongs and threw it into the fire to purify it. Open magazine and Forward Press both retell the episode.

ਕਰੀਅਰ

Dil was writing poetry while still at school, and his verse appeared in Punjabi magazines such as Lakeer, Preetlari and Nagmani. In 1968 a local comrade, Jagjit Singh Baghi, introduced him to Marxism, and he joined the Naxalite movement. According to Wikipedia, he took part in the raid on the Chamkaur police station on 30 April 1969, was arrested and was tortured in custody. Accounts of the length of his imprisonment differ.

His first collection, Satluj di Hava, appeared in 1971. After his release he left Punjab for Uttar Pradesh around the end of 1971, working as an orchard caretaker and in other humble jobs. Around 1972 he converted to Islam, which Penguin describes as an attempt to reconcile equality with his communist ideals, and for a time he took the name Mohammad Bushra. In Uttar Pradesh he mixed with Urdu poets and wrote the poems of Bahut Saare Suraj, published in 1982.

Back in Samrala, friends helped him open a tea stall near the motor market on the Machhiwara road. Writers, drivers and teachers gathered there, and according to Open magazine he got truck drivers to write lines of poetry on the back of their vehicles. Sources differ on when he returned: Wikipedia says 1983, Open magazine says 1990.

In 1997 he published Satthar, and his collected poems appeared as Naglok in 1998, the year of his autobiography Dastaan. A 100-page long poem, Billa Aj Phir Aaya, came out in 2009, two years after his death.

Where many Naxalite poets wrote of an imminent revolution, Dil is remembered for understatement. Wikipedia notes that his poetry focused, for the first time in Punjabi, on landless labourers, Dalits and wandering communities at the very bottom of society. Surjit Patar said he would be counted among the top Punjabi poets of the 20th century.

A poet of the landless: what made his verse different

Dil's subject was the Punjab that other poetry had left at the edge of the page. His poems follow landless labourers walking from village to village in search of work, Dalit families shut out of wells, schools and cremation grounds, and the wandering communities he called the Naglok, the snake people of his collected poems, whom he saw as the land's first inhabitants. Where Pash, the best known poet of the same movement, wrote in a voice of open thunder, Dil worked by understatement: a small, plainly told scene, a labouring woman roasting her heart on a griddle in the poem Nirupama Dutt translated as Dance, carries the whole weight of caste and poverty without a slogan. That quietness is why his work has lasted. It is also why his autobiography matters so much: Dastaan, published in 1998 with a foreword by Amarjit Chandan and an afterword by Prem Parkash, tells the same story in prose, from the whipping at the well to the water jug snatched away at a party meeting, and it is now read as one of the founding texts of Dalit writing in Punjabi.

His years in Uttar Pradesh widened the poetry rather than interrupting it. Living around Mohammadi in Lakhimpur Kheri district between about 1972 and 1983, he fell in with Urdu poets, wrote ghazals in Urdu and composed the poems that became Bahut Saare Suraj. The conversion to Islam he made there around 1972, taking the name Mohammad Bushra for a time, was his search for a community without caste, as Penguin's edition of his memoir explains. He later told Dutt that caste prejudice existed among Muslims too, yet he kept his Muslim practice after returning to Punjab and still published under his old name, Lal Singh Dil.

Recognition in his lifetime and after

Recognition came late and mostly from below. Wikipedia records that he was honoured by small town literary organisations in Punjab rather than by the state, and Dutt wrote that even the small pension of the Punjab Languages Department never reached him. Friends, not institutions, kept him going: they set him up with the tea stall near Samrala's motor market, and the stall became his court, where drivers, teachers and young writers stopped for tea and verse. After his death the wider world arrived. Five of his poems appeared in English in Modern Poetry in Translation in 2012, the same year as Dutt's Poet of the Revolution. In 2017 T. C. Ghai's translation of one hundred poems appeared as Exclusion, Deprivation and Nothingness. Filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj had already featured him in Kitte Mil Ve Mahi, his film on Punjab's Dalit saints and poets.

Legacy

Dil died on 14 August 2007 at Dayanand Medical College and Hospital in Ludhiana. Nirupama Dutt, his friend and translator, wrote that even the small pension of Punjab's Languages Department never reached him. Her English translation of Dastaan and selected poems, Poet of the Revolution, was published by Penguin Viking in 2012, and filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj featured him in Kitte Mil Ve Mahi.

Where was Lal Singh Dil born?

He was born on 11 April 1943 in Ghungrali Sikhan, a village near Samrala in Ludhiana district, Punjab.

What did Lal Singh Dil write?

He wrote three poetry collections, Satluj di Hava (1971), Bahut Saare Suraj (1982) and Satthar (1997), the collected Naglok (1998), the autobiography Dastaan (1998) and the long poem Billa Aj Phir Aaya (2009).

Why is Lal Singh Dil called a Dalit poet?

He was born into a landless Chamar family and wrote openly about caste humiliation at school, in the Naxalite movement and in police custody, giving voice to Punjab's marginalised.